Young director of the National Center for Contemporary Dance in Angers, the choreographer Noé Soulier had the honors of the Agora theater on Monday and Tuesday for his first visit to the Montpellier Danse festival. And rose to the occasion: his creation “First memory”, which explores the relationship between gesture and memory, shakes, fascinates, dazzles!
To say that contemporary dance questions the gesture and the movement falling under the most truistic truism, we will not say it! But we will still allow ourselves to rejoice that she never stops doing it, again, always, tirelessly, creatively, re-newly! Thus, Noé Soulier, the young director of the National Center for Contemporary Dance in Angers, for his first visit to the Montpellier Danse festival, proposed with his creation First memory, to explore the relationship between gesture and memory. In general, we can consider gesture, any organized movement, anticipated, thought out and/or expressive, carrying an intention and supported by a program. “Every day, we observe countless gestures: a hand catching or avoiding something, an arm passing something to someone. In our memory, these movements are often reduced to their purpose, but what is the real complexity of their life?” asks the choreographer in the room sheet.
Pour First memory, he diverts these ordinary, everyday gestures from their initial function, he separates them, he detaches them. By removing the object targeted by the action. By interrupting the movement before the end of the gesture. By appealing to a part of the body that is not physically adapted to the purpose… He thus creates a kind of bodily lexical field that he entrusts to his seven dancers, here more than ever performers because, according to one or the other, the same words do not give the same lights, the same terms do not produce the same ends. Everything shifts a little, redistributes a lot, gets confused sometimes, suddenly harmonizes, etc.
Concretely, any conceptual turbine extinguished, First memory it’s a little over seventy minutes of dance that dances, without interruption, without breathlessness, on the bare stage of the Agora theater whose three movable white partitions break the continuity and redistribute the surface according to the tables. Like sketches of everyday, even domestic spaces. Like architectural gestures thus thought out by the visual artist Thea Djordjaze. Similarly, the score composed by Karl Naegelen for the show and interpreted by the Ictus ensemble (percussion, flute, violin, guitar, double bass, piano), does not proceed by melodic and harmonic narrations, but by dissonant shifts, rhythmic fractions, instrumental bursts… in short, also by uncorrelated, diverted, “decomposed” gestures…
Extremely demanding, since broken, since contracted, since exploded, the dance of Noé Soulier is never more dazzling than in the female solos and pas de deux. A first solo on a Japanese flute looks like a sumptuous Rosetta stone for an incomprehensible body language. Another on the violin similarly fascinates in its constant quest for breaking points of balance… A paroxysm of dance-sheathing!… Further on, a duo, then a trio, slides towards martial choreography, otherwise without impact on the public… What can we also say about this solo of an impossible, inhuman and yet slow pace, except that the abdominals of the public contracted out of solidarity? Soon follows a duet in the same vein, with slow combustion, which sees two dancers doing a palimpsest, the gesture of one being written on that of the other, and the two remaining legible simultaneously. Wonderful.
For the finale, each performer brings different large pieces of aluminum onto the stage and then rolls their bodies. When all these pieces have been modified, designed, body-and-graphed, the dancers leave the stage and we then take the measure of the plastic (metallic) installation which is offered to our gaze: these abstract sculptures which shimmer , which reflect, are the imprints of their body, the traces of their gesture. Retinal persistence of glare. Lastmemory.
–
